Following the death of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, over 80,000 fake accounts were created on various social media platforms to discredit the Mumbai police and Mumbai police commissioner. An FIR has been registered against unknown individuals for posting abusive content against Mumbai police.
“The number could be 8,000 or 80,000. At present it’s difficult to determine the exact number of such accounts that used proxy servers to show they were being posted from foreign locations,” said a police officer.
Mumbai cyber DCP Rashmi Karandikar stated, “There are multiple fake social media account holders trolling the Mumbai police commissioner on different platforms and are using abusive language against him and the force. Hence an FIR has been registered against those account holders under Section 67 of IT Act.”
The offences under Section 67 of Information Technology Act can attract 5 years of imprisonment, or fine up to 5-10 lakh, or both.
Karandikar further added, “Earlier, an FIR was registered on September 2 against a suspect who used a morphed image of the official Twitter account of Mumbai police commissioner and through it posted derogatory contents. We have started the probe in both matters.”
Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh had asked the cyber cell to investigate the matter under Information Technology Act.
“The campaign was run against Mumbai police just to demoralise us at a time when 84 policemen had died due to the pandemic and over 6,000 men were infected with the virus. This was a motivated campaign with vested interest just to malign the image of Mumbai police and derail our line of investigation. Multiple fake accounts on social media were created to target Mumbai police with abusive tones. Our cyber cell is conducting a thorough investigation into this matter and all those found violating the law will be prosecuted under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act,” said Param Bir Singh.
The cyber cell discovered that the posts uploaded were posted from the various other countries including Italy, Japan, Poland, Slovenia, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Romania and France among others.
The outrage against the Mumbai police and AIIMS Forensic Chairman Dr Sudhir Gupta erupted after AIIMS submitted Sushant’s forensic report to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in which it confirmed that it was a suicide not a murder. Sudhire Gupta had released a statement earlier claiming it to be a murder. However, CBI has issued a statement that the investigation is not complete yet.
